Free Children

This is a game for young children of a wide age range, created from scratch with the visual programming language Delphi. The object of the game is to click and burst balloons in groups of two or more to score points. A screen-shot of the game in LEVEL 1 play is shown below:

When you click the NEW GAME button the balloons are randomly generated in 4 colours in LEVEL 1. Clicking on a balloon with the left mouse button will burst it (with a loud bang!). The object is to burst them in groups of two or more to score points. A group is formed by balloons of the same colour with at least one side touching balloons of the same colour. The score increases rapidly with group size - for example you score 1 for 2 balloons, 4 for 3 balloons, 9 for 4, 16 for 5, 25 for 6 and so on to 121 points for 12 balloons to 225 for 16 balloons!

When all the balloons have been burst in the group the player clicks the SCORE button to add the score to the total and the burst balloons then disappear with any balloons above dropping down to take their place. Any completely empty columns are automatically filled by moving any columns on the left towards the right.

The above screen-shot shows the game at the start of a LEVEL 1 game with a group of 6 balloons already burst (scoring 25 points) and the player is part the way through bursting a group of 4 red balloons. When the fourth balloon is burst, the score will go up to 9 which will be added to the total to make it 34 when the SCORE button is clicked. The 4 burst balloons will then disappear and the 6 balloons above will drop down to fill the space.

When there are no groups left to burst (or at any time after the first score) the player can click the REPEAT button to play the same game again with the same start balloon pattern to see if you can beat your best score for that pattern. Otherwise click the NEW GAME button to try a different balloon pattern. There will be many different ways to group and burst the balloons in a particular pattern and the highest scores can be obtained by getting together the largest groups that you can.

To get a big group together you may need to burst a single balloon of another colour that is in the way. You can do this but it will cost 5 points from your total so it has to create quite a big group to make this worthwhile. For example, in the screen-shot above before the red balloons were burst, bursting the yellow balloon in row 2 from the top would have allowed the green balloon above to drop down to increase the green balloon group from 6 to 9. This would have increased the score for the green balloon groups from 25 (for the 6 group) + 4 (for the 3 group) to 64 for the 9 group) - 5 (for the single yellow) to have given a gain of 30 points for the grouping!

But also you might observe that bursting the two yellow balloons at the bottom on the right would have added 1 point to the score and increased the green group by two more as the green balloons above drop down to take their place! This would have given an 11 balloon group which would score 100 points! And there is more since, if this sort of grouping was done after the red ballons were burst, by bursting 3 blue balloons on the left the green balloon group could have reached 12! This is a good illustration of how this game can encourage thinking ahead, introducing children to the idea of strategy in a relatively simple situation and thus appealing to children of a wide age range. The LEVEL 2 game, as described below, should appeal particularly to children at the top end of this age range.

In this level two arrow buttons have been added to help with grouping the balloons. Clicking these buttons at any time in the game will move balloons in the direction of the arrow if there are vacant columns in that direction. The scoring is the same as LEVEL 1 and the potential for getting large groups together in different ways from the same initial balloon pattern is much increased.